Ampex for the mind

I need to start writing things down as soon as I think of them. So many times over the last few weeks I have thought of something which I really want to talk about here but by the time I am sat down in front of the PC, all of it has become just rapidly disipating energy in the heat death of the Universe. I need a permanently running tape for the mind or some form of continuously updating mind map. That actually gives me a clue to something I may be able to do to sort it out. I will buy some felt tip pens for myself and keep then away from my daughter. She never has to worry about not having any paper or pens to draw with. I remember being anxious about not having something to draw on when I was little; you just didn't always have paper around let alone have all the pens you might want. Sometimes, I actually tore out the blank pages at the front of books to draw on. Silly really because when I asked my dad, I was always given paper even if it was just the back of catalogues. I had one book which was a catalogue for the German firm of Polensky and Zoellner. I actually looked at the pictures as well as drawing on the back of them and so I know all about Gabions and there cannot be many ten year olds who know what they are. Come to think of it there can't be many people outside the "Boring - see civil engineers" world who know either. My father was anything but boring I must add - it is all perception you know. He knows a lot about a lot as I have often said. It is just that campaigning to keep a rather unattractive grandstand from demolition just because it is an early example of reinforced concrete seems to give people completely the wrong idea about him. Think about how much concrete is around you and how beautiful some things made of it can be. I know a lot of it looks just horrid but that is down to maintenance and short-cuts by the owners of buildings. It is all down to what you like and don't like when it comes to architecture along with making things fit it in with what has gone before. So many architects have no respect for the overall environment and just put up some eye-catching stump for the sake of making a name. I can't find a picture of it, but there was a plan to make an extension for what I think was a London Gallery of some sort. The drawing was all anglular steel and on its own looked wonderful but placed in between older more conventional buildings it appeared that someone had dropped a piece of crushed metal in the street. Same with the fourth grace. A Graceless Grace indeed. Someone ask the people of Liverpool what they want. If you go to Will Alsop's page and look for the Fourth Grace pictures you will see that that this thing looks like a large whale trying to sneak its way back to the Mersey. The website is as I though a triumph of pretentious style over actual content. Actually, let us retract a bit of this. The presentation pages look quite interesting and the building will be very impressive. It is just not in the right place and it is not a Grace, more like a Tracy or possibly a Tara. And don't those stilts at the front look worrying as if it can't actually take the weight?

Will Alsop said this :

"Our work as architects, currently poised to be able to give the world extraordinairy objects of desire, is currently under threat by people who see the world as a dull and uncultured place of tedium and boredom. STOP THEM. Write them out of your story."

This sounds a bit messianic to me. I hope you will agree that I do not see the world as dull and uncultured etc but this sounds like a way of making all dissentors seem like Philistines. Better anti than pretentious and publicity seeking. I know I will never make a real thud in this world but if I could, I would not want to do it by having a laugh with society as Mr Alsop seems to want to do.

Mr Alsop puts his fingers to his chin as if stroking an invisible beard (he knows the sign language for "man" of course) and utters a gentle but possibly patronising "hmmmm". The spirit of Freud is alive in Mr Alsop and just to rub it in he resists the temptation to light up a cigar and put on a Viennese accent. He is of course afraid of any Freudian symbolism in his architecture and that is why the Fourth Grace is shaped like an egg on stilits. Somewhere deep within his towering intellect, there is a stirring of a long forgotten dream from his school days. They laughed at him and his big ideas but he has shown them what he can really do. It wasn't like Larkin said. It was the Philistines around him who made him work his way up to this. Of course everyone loved the Peckham Library. It has those stilits again; we are of course in London and what would happen to all those books if the Barrage didn't work properly? Mr Alsop is silent and will not answer questions. He is a nice man and he didn't have anything to do with those nasty tower blocks which so buggered up the 60s and 70s did he? We are City sick. Let us build an architecture park in a big field somewhere, read Papanek and dream of how wonderful the world could be for everyone. Mr Alsop utters no sound other than a second "hmmm". He is happy with the world as it is.

I want to write so much more - I could write all afternoon but sadly for the architects of this world I have to get on with some real work. Think of scale man and you will have your building.